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HOLY LAND'S ANCIENT ART AT THE MET

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September 26, 1986, Page 00001Buy Reprints The New York Times Archives

BENEATH the calm surface of ''Treasures of the Holy Land: Ancient Art From the Israel Museum'' lies a complex, if not stormy, show. It is thoughtful and sometimes inspired in its consideration and installation of objects from a very special part of the world, where religion is like oxygen and archeology is a way of life. But its desire to avoid controversy creates an atmosphere in which the intensity and passion of the Holy Land struggle to breathe.

With all that the exhibition has to offer, and it is extremely informative, it is also evasive. Originally scheduled for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and then canceled in 1984 in a decision museum officials now regret, the show in the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall of the Metropolitan through Jan. 4 is cautious and restrained. It wants facts and nothing but the facts. The problem is that those facts drive home that controversy has been endemic to the Holy Land and the lifeblood of the art produced there.

The strength of the show is not esthetic. While this is not an exhibition of objects that will thunder into the imagination with the impact of Assyrian horses or Egyptian kings, it nevertheless contains numerous objects with the capacity to bring distant times and places to life. Using strange, and in many cases recently discovered, archeological material, ''Treasures of the Holy Land'' is first and foremost an archeological survey of a part of the world the size of New Jersey that may mean more, to more people, than any other.

While the show treats every object with scholarly care, it is also schematic. It uses a limited number of works, 150, many of them small-scale and functional, to document an immense span of time, more than 10,000 years. Most of the objects come from the Israel Museum, a 20-year-old institution in Jerusalem that is Israel's main archeological repository. In their introduction to a catalogue filled with indispensable documentation, Yael Israeli and Miriam Tadmor, two curators at the Israel Museum, describe the 150 works as the ''quintessence'' of their collections.

In a region in which religion pervades every aspect of daily existence, any object is a potential discovery. The ''Model of a House'' from the early third millennium B.C. is a plain ceramic structure, 8 1/8 inches tall and 10 1/2 inches wide, with one open doorway and four walls. The house seems swollen with movement. The walls appear to be blowing back and forth, and the entire structure seems to reverberate with the breath of life.

The ''Shrine of the Stelae'' would be enough by itself to transform almost any setting into a ritual site. It dates from the middle of the second millennium and consists of 10 stone steles, one seated figure, a miniature lion gate and a stone slab lying on the ground like an altar. No stone is more than two feet tall. Except for the altar, all the objects take their place within a half-circle that echoes the crescent engraved into the priestly figure's chest. The small scale, the formal rhythms and the procession of upright slabs make this the most hypnotic work in the show. The marble ''Head of a Young

Woman'' dates from the second century A.D., when the Holy Land was under the dominion of Rome. The eyes still bear traces of paint. While the young woman and the carving technique are Roman, the feeling for the sculptural volume of the head suggests Assyria and Egypt. The plaited hair glides back and then up, giving the frontal head an internal dynamism that seems to have been drawn from the same source as the restless energy of the ''Model of a House.''

The exhibition has a troubled history. It was originally scheduled for 1984, then canceled by the Metropolitan because of fears aroused by a dozen objects that had been in the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem - now known as the Archeological Museum in Jerusalem. East Jerusalem belonged to Jordan until the 1967 war, when Israel took it over. Israel's claim to one Jerusalem united under Israeli rule continues to be disputed by the Arabs, which led the Metropolitan to believe the exhibition would involve too great a security risk. The dozen objects are in the current show, but it would almost take a detective to find them.

Although officially ''The Treasures of the Holy Land'' was organized jointly by the Metropolitan Museum and the Israel Museum, the distribution of responsibility is peculiar. The Metropolitan played a decisive role in the selection of the objects, and the Met designed its low-keyed installation, but in the press release the curator of the exhibition is Miriam Tadmor of the Israel Museum. Apart from a foreword, neither the Met, nor the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, nor the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the other venues for the exhibition, contributed to the catalogue.

This is one reason why the show is so removed from issues with which many American artists and intellectuals are now concerned.

The one contribution by someone who is not from the Israel Museum is the ''Archaeologist's Introduction'' by William G. Dever of the University of Arizona. Mr. Dever indicates the speed with which archeology has evolved. More and more disciplines, including ethnography, climatology and the history of technology, are now part of archeological analysis and interpretation. Mr. Dever emphasizes the spirit of international cooperation in Israel - the ''open and progressive archaeological climate'' that he says has ''encouraged the foreign schools in Jerusalem to continue their work.''

The exhibition leaves no doubt about archeology's political and social importance. In the Holy Land, history can never be an abstraction.

Not just the Israeli past, but also the spiritual and cultural patrimony of other nations and religions is always right there, inescapable, in the light and stone, and piled inside the earth.

Archeology in the Holy Land could not be more loaded. It is a means of dialogue and self-exploration, but it is also inevitably a source of power.

With all its silences, ''Treasures of the Holy Land'' has a lot to say. There are not only heads and figurines, but also ossuaries, seals, coins, jewelry, mosaics and enough epigraphic material to emphasize the role of the word. In documenting the history of the Holy Land and making us aware of all the cultures that conquered, relinquished and settled it, the show dramatizes what a melting pot this extraordinary region has been.

The installation is basically divided into six sections. The first includes objects from the Natufian culture and focuses on the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods. An ''Anthropomorphic Figurine'' from the sixth millennium B.C. is Brancusi-like in its purity. A ceramic ''Seated Woman,'' in which tiny stones seem to have been kneaded together like dough, is an heir to prehistoric fertility goddesses.

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In the ''Beersheba Venus,'' breasts are eyes, the navel is a mouth, and the work is a precursor of a key image in Surrealism.

The next stop is the Bronze Age, with its ''Anthropoid Sarcophagi,'' among the many objects in the show that reveal the meticulous preparation for death that was characteristic of Middle Eastern cultures. Next is the Israelite Period or Iron Age. In this period King Solomon built the First Temple, which was destroyed in 586 or 587 B.C. by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar.

Relatively little has been found from the Persian period that followed, which is taken as a sign of the turbulence in the region after the destruction of the First Temple. Under Persian rule the Temple was rebuilt.

After Alexander the Great conquered the Middle East in 332 B.C., the culture of the Holy Land was marked by Greece.

The Second Temple was destroyed around A.D. 70. ''First built by Zerubbabel in 520 B.C.,'' the catalogue says, ''consecrated again by the Hasmonaeans, and lavishly reconstructed by Herod, the Temple stood in Jerusalem as a center of Jewish life and national identity. The dramatic event of its destruction never faded from the memory of the nation, and efforts to overcome this trauma would shadow the entire future history of Judaism.''

There are three Byzantine floor mosaics. The one made for a villa includes three fish organized into the kind of insistent pattern that is familiar from Byzantine mosaics in Italy.

The mosaic made for a church features a lion with a mane like a crown and a tail like a snake and a similar decorative flair. The largest mosaic was made for a synagogue, and it includes a Torah shrine that evoked the Temple in Jerusalem. By ending with the Dead Sea Scrolls, the exhibition calls attention both to the importance of the Bible and to the advances in knowledge that have been made possible by archeology.

With all the exhibition has to offer, the unwillingness to speculate leaves it strangely limited. For example, Martin Weyl, the director of the Israel Museum, writes in the catalogue that when ''facing the actual remains of antiquity, visitors may be startled to realize how little the objects conform to the images they have lived with since childhood.'' Although the same point is made by Mr. Dever, there is no attempt to consider this gap, or to reflect upon the role archeology has played in the 20th-century split between literal and imaginative truth, or between science and faith.

In addition, while outlining the evolution of archeology, the catalogue does not consider what this rapid evolution means for our understanding of history. If the totality of early sites is irrecoverable, and if almost every archeological discovery is approached with more sophistication than previous discoveries, then what does the history of the Holy Land mean, and how authoritative can it be?

Furthermore, no answers are suggested to some of the most intriguing questions raised by individual objects. Why was there so much interest in the nose? If we are presented with an object as fascinating as the fifth-century A.D. ''Plaque Against the Evil Eye,'' shouldn't there be some discussion of what the evil eye was and how this plaque actually worked?

If the catalogue entry for the second millennium B.C. ''Anthropoid Sarcophagus'' tells us a man was placed in the coffin first and the woman second, shouldn't there be some discussion of the role of gender in burial customs?

What is disconcerting is the show's apparent unawareness that what matters for an American audience is not that questions like these would be definitively answered but that they would be addressed. And if the exhibition is going to argue for caution and decorum, then we should not have to walk directly from the Dead Sea Scrolls into a Holy Land shop.

''Treasures of the Holy Land'' will change our sense of the past, but it could have expanded our understanding of the present as well.

After closing at the Metropolitan, the exhibition will travel to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (April 9 to July 5) and to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston (Oct. 30, 1987, to Jan. 17, 1988). The show was made possible in part by Mr. and Mrs. Milton Petrie; Frederick, Daniel and Elihu Rose; Mr. and Mrs. Laurence A. Tisch; an anonymous donor; Mr. and Mrs. Eugene M. Grant, and Mortimer B. Zuckerman.

A version of this article appears in print on September 26, 1986, on Page C00001 of the National edition with the headline: HOLY LAND'S ANCIENT ART AT THE MET. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe